BERKELEY – Thanks
to recent investigative works such
as "Fast Food Nation" and "Supersize
Me," a
growing number of Americans are scrutinizing
ingredient labels and asking, What is this
stuff? Michael Pollan,
Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, can
tell you. In a just-released new book, he takes readers
to the feedlot, to the farm, and into the woods in
search of the origins of our dinner. Will
we have the nerve to follow?

POLLAN IN PERSON
On April 17, Pollan will discuss "The Omnivore's
Dilemma" with Davia Nelson, host of NPR's "The
Kitchen Sisters." The free lecture starts
at 7 p.m. in Andersen Auditorium at the Haas
School of Business; a webcast will be posted
two days later.

"Imagine
for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a
matter of course, these few unremarkable things:
What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How
it found its way to our table. And what, in a true
accounting, it really cost," writes Pollan in
"The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of
Four Meals."

By the time readers reach this passage, which
comes at the very end of the book, they will be able
to answer at length.
They will have tagged along as Pollan traces
the path from earth to plate taken by four meals — from
McDonald's, Whole Foods, a
small Virginia farm, and a "first person" dinner
that he killed, foraged, and grew himself. Pollan
is a genial tour guide through a variety of disciplines.
Along the way
to his main destinations — the feedlot where "his" steer
is being fattened, the vast facility where organic
baby lettuces are being washed and bagged, the pasture
in which chickens joyfully root through
cow manure, or the forest where he is helping to
disembowel a wild boar he has just shot — he
delivers fascinating mini-lectures on agricultural
history, plant biology, food chemistry, nutrition,
and the animal-rights debate.

Readers of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" will
learn that the bulk of the American diet comes from
one plant: corn. Grown on massive farms, oceans'
worth of the golden kernels and green stalks are
then processed, deconstructed, and reassembled in
factories into everything from a Chicken McNugget
to salad dressing. We eat so much corn that, biologically
speaking, most Americans are corn on two legs.

Berkeley residents
and other health-conscious readers who are right
now comforting themselves with the thought, "But I don't
eat that stuff; I shop at Whole Foods," will
learn some things about the label "organic" that
will forever affect, for example, how they look at
Rosie the Organic Chicken. And no reader, meanwhile,
will be able to ignore any longer the fact that America's
seemingly endless supply of cheap food, whether grown
industrially or organically, "is floating on
a sinking sea of petroleum."

Do Americans really want to know what
we're eating? That's
the central gamble of Pollan's book. Are we disturbed
enough by mad-cow disease, E.
coli outbreaks,
mercury levels, and reports like last week's New
York Times story on
arsenic levels in chicken to
look, as the old saying goes, at how the sausage
is made?

Or do we just desperately want someone trustworthy
to answer the question that kicks off "The Omnivore's
Dilemma": "What should we have for dinner?" To
tell us, once and for all, fats or carbs, McDonald's
or Whole Foods, steak or tofu, sugar
or high fructose corn syrup or aspartame? Such are
the decisions underpinning the "omnivore's dilemma" of
Pollan's title.

If you're hoping that Pollan will put an end to
our food anxiety by just telling us what to eat,
forget it. "I don't think it's a journalist's
job to issue shopping lists or policy descriptions," Pollan
explains over lunch. "We're
supposed to show people how the world is, to give
them the tools they need to make good decisions as
citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values
are — the environment, your
health, animal welfare — the answers are going
to be different for every person."

Defying the bread fatwa

Here's yet another tough question:
Where should one take Michael Pollan for
lunch? He agrees to meet at Phoenix Next Door, a
few blocks from his office at the Graduate School
of Journalism, which he had not yet tried since moving
to Berkeley from Connecticut in 2003. For
the curious, we both had the spaghetti, housemade
with organic, local ingredients and topped with a
spicy ragú of "naturally
raised" beef, lamb, and pork. However, when
ordering, neither of us asked what "naturally
raised" entailed, although we both admitted
later that we usually would have.

'You hear plenty of explanations for humanity's
expanding waistline, all of them plausible. … But
it pays to go a little further, to search for
the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply,
is this: When food is abundant and cheap, people
will eat more of it and get fat.'

-Michael
Pollan, writing in "The Omnivore's
Dilemma"

"I'm not an
ayatollah about this stuff, I'm really not. I don't
hector people," insists
Pollan, who doesn't seem like a food
fascist either in the book or in person. Tall and
lanky, with a bald promontory of a forehead and a
meter-wide grin, he manages to seem simultaneously
bookish and outdoorsy. In a sense, he's the journalistic
heir to English agronomist and organic agriculture
pioneer Sir Albert Howard, who died in 1947: Howard,
quotes Pollan, believes we should treat the "whole
problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man
as one great subject."

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" grew out
of the final section of Pollan's best-selling last
book, "The
Botany of Desire," which looked at apples, tulips,
cannabis, and genetically modified potatoes from
the evolutionary point of view of the plants. The
potato chapter "was the first time I really
learned how we grow food in this country," he
explains. "I'd been to little
hobby farms, but I hadn't seen a 10,000-acre, monoculture
potato field, where the soil has been absolutely
sterilized, so doused with pesticides that people
can't even go into it for four days."

The other catalyst was the moment in the fall of
2002 when Americans en masse foreswore bread
for bacon and embraced the Atkins diet. "All
of a sudden we completely flopped the identity of
good and evil in the diet we'd been eating since
1977. Carbohydrates, not fat, became the
enemy," marvels Pollan. "That said
to me that this is a nation with an eating disorder."

Children of the corn

The four
meals in "Omnivore" — call them Industrial,
Big Organic, Pastoral, and Hunter-Gatherer — seem
very different, but they can be plotted on a continuum
between two ways of looking at the food chain: as
a machine, or as a living organism.

In Industrial,
the most mechanical of the four, inputs of patented
seeds and fossil energy are converted into outputs
of carbohydrates and protein. This machine became
truly turbocharged in 1947, Pollan writes, when the
U.S. government had a huge postwar surplus
of ammonium nitrate (the main ingredient in making
explosives). Ammonium, it had been known for some
time, is an excellent source of nitrogen for plants,
which helps them convert sunlight into carbohydrates.
So the government instructed an
Alabama munitions plant to make
chemical fertilizer from its bomb material, and modern-day
fertilizer was born. (Similarly, modern pesticides
were derived from poison gases first developed for
wartime use.)

What a dollar buys in the average
U.S. supermarket:
1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies, vs.
250 calories of carrots; 875 calories of soda,
vs. 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

To simplify Pollan's intricate, mesmerizing
history drastically, the boom in synthetic fertilizer
enabled farmers to grow vast quantities of corn without
bankrupting their soil. Corn pushed out pasture-raised
cattle and pigs and chickens, as it became more economical
to warehouse them together in "Confined
Animal Feeding Operations," or CAFOs, and stuff
them full of corn. One hitch: the stomachs of cows,
one of the few mammals evolutionarily designed to
be able to eat grass, can't digest corn. It turns
their stomachs acidic and makes them sick. No problem,
says the machine: Just pump the cows full of antibiotics,
which has the added benefit of making them grow
bigger and fatter faster, so they can be slaughtered
younger. At least most cattle still live outdoors,
Pollan writes, albeit standing ankle-deep in their
own excrement. Pigs and chickens, which can digest
corn, suffer even more squalid existences, as he
describes in the lone section of the book in which
outrage can be detected beneath his even-handed tone.

The Industrial machine has been fine-tuned to produce
vast quantities of processed cheap food. But its
cheapness is deceptive. Corn, a farmer tells
Pollan disdainfully, is the "welfare queen of
crops." Every
bushel of corn currently enjoys a 50-cent subsidy
from the U.S. government, the result of a spike in
food prices in the early 1970s that caused the Nixon
administration to switch free-market tactics. "We've
been supporting agriculture since the Depression,
but we've changed the way you do it — from
essentially supporting the farmers to supporting
the crop," says Pollan.

Supporting the crop means supporting agribusiness,
which leverages cheap ingredients into high profits.
Corn is cheaper than sugar, so high fructose corn
syrup replaced it as sweetener in sodas in the 1980s,
and in just about everything else ever since. Corn
stripped to its building blocks and reassembled is
now the source for most food additives, from sweeteners
to stabilizers to artificial colors and preservatives.
In one of the book's most jaw-dropping statistics,
Pollan writes that more than a quarter of the 45,000
items in an average American supermarket contain
corn.

"Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz,
the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit
and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and
cake mixes…everything from the toothpaste
and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags,
cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries,
right down to the shine of the magazine that catches
your eye by the checkout: corn," he writes. "Indeed,
even the supermarket itself — the
wallboard and joint compound, the petroleum and fiberglass
and adhesives out of which the building itself has
been built — is in no small measure a manifestation
of corn. And us?"

Yup — we're corn chips in clothes. Pollan
confirmed this
using a mass spectrometer operated by UC Berkeley
colleague Todd Dawson. (Carbon derived from corn
has a special marker that can be tracked and measured.)
The McDonald's meal that the Pollan family consumed
in the car for Omnivore Meal No. 1 might have looked
like a hamburger, chicken nuggets, and a salad,
but it was engineered overwhelmingly from corn…representing
enough bushels to overflow the trunk, he calculates.

Getting out of the maize

OK. Americans are as corny as they come. So what?

"To start, it's a problem from a health point
of view," says Pollan, explaining cheerfully
that as omnivores, humans need about 50 different
molecules and atoms — amino acids, minerals,
phytochemicals, fat, sugar, etc. "A lot
of people eating a fast-food diet — not just
the drive-through kind, but also microwaveable and
other prepackaged meals – are malnourished." Another
UC Berkeley colleague, biochemistry professor Bruce
Ames, is studying obese California children who
have rickets, a deficiency traditionally associated
with starvation. "By eating from one very narrow
cut of nature's bounty, you're not going to get all
the nutrients you need. We need to eat at least 10
plants to get those 50 nutrients."

Other, bigger hidden costs are also associated with
corn-based cheap food. "We pay with our taxes,
because it takes heavy, heavy government subsidies
to produce food that cheaply," he says. "We
pay with the public health system, with failing antibiotics
[whose overuse in cattle has given rise to new antibiotic-resistant
strains of 'super-bugs']. We pay with the miles-wide
dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico [caused by nitrate-dense
agricultural runoff carried out by the Mississippi
River]. We pay by having to defend our high-energy
food system by fighting wars in the Middle East."

Fossil-fuel
consumption by agriculture: 20%
Distance average item
of food travels to your plate: 1,500 miles

You see, the American corn diet is really an oil
diet. Corn, as Pollan puts it, "is the SUV of
plants. Growing it the way we do requires it to guzzle
fuel in the form of fertilizer, about a quarter to
a third of a gallon of petroleum for each bushel." Processing
the corn requires even more energy, as does moving
those corn-derived products around the country. A
diet based on cheap fossil fuel is rather
vulnerable right now, Pollan points out: "If
oil gets dramatically more expensive, that will change
our food system as much as food policy or consumer
choice."

"Once upon a time there was a happy
cow…"

If industrial agriculture has turned nature into
an oil-slurping machine, then surely organic agriculture,
which treats the food chain more like a living organism,
is better, right?

Well…as with many things in "The Omnivore's
Dilemma," the answer is a little more complicated
than those cartoon labels of "happy cows" frolicking
on pesticide-free grass, or stories about "free-range
vegetarian" chickens on egg cartons, would have
us believe. Pollan calls these labels and similar
conscience-appeal marketing "Supermarket Pastoral." He
might as well call them fairy tales. Under his scrutiny,
they hold up "about
as well as you would expect anything genuinely
pastoral to hold up in the belly of an $11 billion
industry, which is to say not very well at all."

Fossil-fuel energy spent growing, chilling,
washing, packaging, and transporting box of lettuce
from California to East Coast:
More than 4,600 calories

Long before
it became a USDA label — and a permission slip to
charge more at the cash register — "organic" was
a philosophy. The word "organic," Pollan
writes, was chosen in 1942 by J.I. Rodale, the founding
editor of "Organic Gardening and Farming" magazine,
to emphasize that nature, not a machine, is the proper
model for agriculture.

Several decades and several
food scares after "Silent Spring" and "Diet
for a Small Planet" gave birth to the '60s organic
movement,
"organic" is now a very big tent. Under
this tent are some very strange beasts,
such as organic feedlots and organic high fructose
corn syrup. Big Organic, represented by the companies
able to supply Whole Foods and Fresh Fields outlets all around
the country, has more in common
with Industrial than with the
quaint red barns pictured on their labels, says Pollan.
(Those barns can only be honestly claimed by Pastoral,
the small local farms that may or may not be organically
certified, but do a much better job of mimicking
nature's way of producing food.)

Grimmway and Cal-Organic,
two of California's biggest organic vegetable suppliers,
were started by conventional growers looking for
a more profitable niche and concerned that their
preferred pesticides were about to be banned by California.
Horizon, the top supplier of organic
milk, is owned
by Dean Foods, the largest conventional milk bottler
in the country; Horizon's "happy
cows" rarely encounter a blade of grass, writes
Pollan. Instead of gamboling in the pastures, most
of them stand around in a dry lot
"tethered to milking machines three times a
day."

And Rosie the Organic Chicken? She lives in
one of several low, football-field-sized sheds in
Petaluma, Cal., with 20,000 other chickens, sipping
water from tubes and eating organic corn and other
feed from elevated trays. Pollan made two separate
visits, wearing a special HazMat-type suit to
prevent spreading infection in the crowded quarters
(the birds cannot be treated with antibiotics then
sold as organic). Not a single chicken ventured out
one of the shed's two doors to the outside while
he was there. "I think the 'free range' conecept
is for our benefit," he concludes.

Right about now, many readers are probably despairing.
(I was.) Pollan sympathizes: "People
say, 'Now
you're telling me organic is not what I thought?'
There is this feeling that's it's too complicated,
it's too hard. But ethical choices are hard.
We like it when Whole Foods comes along and says,
'It's OK. Just shop here; we've checked everything
out for you.' But have they really? You can buy farmed
Atlantic salmon at the Whole Foods right here in
Berkeley — one
of the least sustainable foods out there."

In the second half of "The
Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan
leaves the supermarket behind and
goes back to the land: to a small farm in Virginia,
and to the California hills to hunt wild pigs and
mushrooms. On Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, he learns
how intensively grazing cattle on grass — moving
them daily and following them with chickens, then
pigs — can actually end up producing more topsoil
and more fertility than was there before. In effect, "there
can be a free lunch in nature," Pollan marvels,
one powered by free solar energy captured
by grass.

Compared to Industrial and Big Organic, this poster
child for Pastoral food is extremely labor intensive.
Intentionally, it would never scale to an industrial
level. Which means farms like it are few and far
between; Pollan knows of no California counterpart.
Since Salatin is not willing to ship his food out
of state, as that would violate the principles of
sustainability, most readers will never taste a meal
raised quite as sustainably and ethically. Nor is
the average reader likely to be able to enjoy a meal
like Pollan's fourth, which he hunted (wild boar),
foraged (wild mushrooms, Bing cherries, and yeast
for the bread), or grew (lettuce, herbs) almost entirely
himself.

So in the end, we've come full circle. What should
we have for dinner, darn it? Knowing what we know,
how do we navigate the sea of choices, all of which
seem to be ethically compromised in some way?

"I hope the answer is not 'Ugh,
this is just too complicated, I give up,'" says
Pollan mock-wearily. "The
answer is to figure out what your values are. You
care about the environment? There's a certain way
to eat. If you care about our dependence on oil,
there's a certain way to eat. If you care about pesticides
and your health, then going to Whole Foods will pretty
much take care of you. If you care about the animals,
there's another set of labels to look for."

Pollan's section on animal rights and vegetarianism,
by the way, makes for very thought-provoking reading.
He concludes that it's not the principle
of eating animals that's wrong, but the practice:
the manner in which most cows, pigs, and chickens
are raised for food in this country is truly abhorrent.
Healthier and more humane options do exist that are
better for the animal, for our health, and for the
planet. (Pollan is pretty persuasive on the ecological
havoc that would be wreaked if we all became
vegetarian.) "You
can buy grass-fed beef right here at Berkeley Bowl.
And I still buy Rosie's. I saw it, and I still eat
it," offers
Pollan. "Rosie chickens are not leading idyllic
chicken lives, but I don’t think they're suffering" — they're
not debeaked or as overcrowded as conventional birds,
nor are they eating rendered chicken parts or reconstituted
manure.

Ultimately, it's about incremental improvements. "I'm
a half-a-loaf guy. You take it as far as
you can, and inevitably you make compromises," he
says. "We get three votes a day, actually more, when
we eat. If we cast some of those votes with full
consciousness of what's involved, and try to make
better choices — which
might entail spending more money or going out of
our way — then that will help create the food
chain we want."

He shrugs: "I'm
sorry it's not easier, but it's also not that
hard." And with that,
Michael Pollan picks up a piece of bread and polishes
off the last tasty bits of sauce from his lunch.
"Mmm. This was really good."